Over the past five years, I have adapted to a host of new policies, procedures, and reorganizations at the college and national levels: changes in summer semester lengths, increases in class sizes, college-wide administrative reorganization, syllabus reviews looking for language related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and state rewrites of course results. Throughout this process, I maintained a fiercely optimistic attitude, suspending any criticism—anticipated upheavals usually subsided. Most changes occur for good reasons (they are usually not implemented arbitrarily) and are unobtrusive to my activities as a professor. In short, I am not cynical and am open to change, but within reasonable limits.
Florida’s newly revised university syllabus regulations require professors at public universities to publish their syllabus at least 45 days before classes begin, which crosses the threshold of rationality. While there are concerns about the laboriousness of submitting syllabuses 45 days before school starts, as well as potential political issues with censorship (some faculty feel that releasing syllabuses is an effort to persecute unfavorable viewpoints), my opposition to this new policy is neither labor-based nor politically motivated. My biggest concern is that all “required and recommended” readings must be included in the syllabus before the semester begins. This means that new readings cannot be added (as this would violate the binding pre-published syllabus), making the reading list inflexible and causing classroom teaching to be hampered.
This is not representative of a secret political argument. In fact, my criticism of static reading lists has nothing to do with politics, even though these policies reflect partisan political agendas: it has to do with pedagogy. The problem is not that the readings will be made public, but that they will be fixed, limiting creative intervention by professors once the semester begins. The key here is not transparency; It’s agency. Every instructor will put together the readings for a course before the start date (and, for charity, it’s probably a good thing to make sure instructors prepare the course as early as possible when possible), but losing the ability to substitute readings over the course of a semester reduces the effectiveness of effective teaching, which requires constant improvement.
A good course always changes subtly as the semester changes—changes in course policy, additional reading (or omitted reading), adjusted assignments, or new class activities discovered during teaching conferences. Sometimes these changes are made during the semester as it is realized that another approach will better serve student learning. To be clear, teachers probably shouldn’t completely change their entire reading list mid-semester, but they must retain the ability to make decisions about reading as the semester unfolds and not be tied to a static reading list. College classrooms require teacher agency, and any meaningful limitations on that agency will in turn make the classroom less dynamic for students.
Consider how limiting an instructor’s ability to change readings as needed would disrupt the course’s interaction with the outside world. In the fall, I took a PhD course in Artificial Intelligence in the Humanities. Although there are fixed reading materials every week, professors provide reading materials on artificial intelligence software developed in real time every week. Static readings, no matter how carefully chosen, simply cannot keep up with this emerging technology, and the newly added weekly readings are often the most insightful. Florida’s new syllabus policy would prohibit such practices. It is important to note that this is not, by any means, an unprepared teacher who lazily adds reading material as the semester goes on, but rather a teacher who works even harder to supplement an already extensive reading list with newly published material.
In my own courses, as a first-year composition teacher, I am constantly recalibrating the line between challenging students and promoting discussion and interest. I know that some readings can be difficult for students (e.g., when teaching them how to read peer-reviewed academic articles), but other times, I want more accessible readings, ones that make arguments that students can really invest in, often on topics with which they are already familiar. This way, students can reflect on how compelling they find the argument (on something they may already have a partially developed position on), and then, from there, we can dissect the argument together.
Last semester, I swapped some class readings for two recently published argumentative pieces on the Labubu toy trend (a beautifully researched piece from a national publication and an imperfect opinion piece from a smaller publication). In this case, the reading was very good: the article sparked lively discussion, not only about its content (rabbits and fleeting collecting trends), but also about its structure and its rhetorical effect. Assigning a text like this shows students that writing is not just an exercise done in the classroom but an activity that grapples with the real world, whether the subject is as timeless as poverty or as ephemeral as rabbis.
How do you assign readings about an ongoing trend to capture student interest when all readings must be fixed before the trend begins? A curriculum can only be responsive to the world if teachers have the necessary agency over the readings they assign. Reading lists must be adjustable to a reasonable extent.
Of course, my example of the Labubus argument is trivial in one sense – it actually has nothing to do with the content of the paper, but rather the fact that students can relate to the subject matter (my course teaches students writing, argumentation, and research – not consumer trends). But consider a hard science course: If a teacher becomes aware of a new discovery that makes a previous scientific claim obsolete, should they be allowed to exchange readings about the old claim with someone about the new discovery? Or should they continue to be beholden to outdated science in the name of “transparency”?
I think the new regulations regarding syllabi and reading lists are an unfortunate harbinger of over-standardization (of the kind prevalent in K-12 educational settings), which is explicitly restrictive. In fact, as I said, there are reasons to avoid this intrusion into teachers’ classrooms because it inhibits creativity in teaching. However, we must consider not only the utility of autonomy but also the principle of autonomy. Professors should retain autonomy over the delivery of materials—structured around state- and university-mandated course outcomes—because of what this means for students taking courses at the university. Professors are not convenient vehicles for predetermined content; they are, in the best cases, experts in the materials that facilitate student learning.
Ask anyone, whether teachers or students, whether they would be better served by more standardization and less novelty in the classroom (whether in the name of transparency or not), and there is no doubt in my mind that they will not say that they prefer a learning model of rote learning over one that allows for improvisation and the latest expert guidance.
